Linden Lab Announces Then Pauses AI Character Designer

 

Several days ago, Linden Lab announced they were making available an AI Character Designer to Premium-Plus residents. 

We are making the Character Designer available on the main grid for early testing and feedback to Premium Plus residents. While we have completed initial internal evaluations, we encourage all interested residents to explore this alpha release, identify any issues, and share their input so we can continue refining the tool.

What is the Character Designer?

Developed in collaboration with Convai, the Character Designer empowers you to craft, customize, and animate virtual characters within Second Life. This tool is intended for developers, community builders, roleplay enthusiasts, and anyone looking to enhance their inworld experiences through dynamic characters.

Current Capabilities and Intended Use

The Character Designer provides a solid foundation for immersive roleplay, offering a range of features that let you shape and refine the personalities and behaviors of your inworld characters. Current capabilities include:

• Early-Stage Roleplay Support – Characters respond intelligently through IM, adapting and evolving as you interact.
• Custom Personalities and Backstories – Define unique histories, preferences, and communication styles to bring your characters to life.
• Integration with Existing SL Systems – Connect through a dedicated alt account, set arrival points, and fine-tune behavior filters for a seamless inworld experience.

This was quickly mentioned in the forums, where it quickly got hundreds of responses. Some expressed interest in the AIs. Some made jokes, "the thought of Second Life being so dead that they're trying to occupy its antisocial user base with chat bots." Some wondered if Linden Lab was doing this because AI was "the new shinny" thing in technology. But some expressed privacy concerns about private chats being exposed, "f that's not a password harvesting bot, I don't know what is.  NO WE DONT NEED AI." It was also brought up that anyone signing up to use one would be entirely responsible for whatever output it made, even if it wasn't it's creator's idea, "By agreeing to this, the bot, a literal black box I have no control over, can be made to say stupid **** and I would be entirely responsible for it. This is dead on arrival and has no place in Second Life as it's used. No one will want to take the risk that their store bot (perhaps in an adult store) can be coaxed into saying something truly reprehensible by a random stranger and then abuse reported for it, which as this is AI, should be pretty trivial." 

 

Finally after a few days and 17 pages of posts, Darcy Linden announced the new bots were being put on hold.

 

Hey everyone, thank you for posting in this thread and continuing the conversation!

We've taken your feedback and the Character Designer experiment has been paused while we retool.

I bolded experiment as that's what this is, and it's how we want to proceed with new ideas: get it out early, collect feedback, and optimize/terminate.

When we started this test, the goal was NPCs like Greeters, store clerks, quest givers, etc. It's a creator tool. The companions were an attempt to scale down as NPCs will require more work and this space is in its infancy. AI has been in Second Life for years now and this experiment doubles as an investigation into how we facilitate the allowing people to make cool experiences while respecting the rights and privacy of others. 

With that said, many creators have reached out to me personally with excitement and ideas.

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AI in/for Second Life is NEVER meant to replace people. EVER. It is a tool, to help us connect, create, and explore.

———

This statement isn't a marketing ploy. We all understand the value (and potential dangers) of AI and are taking incremental steps to integrate these tools to help creators make the best experiences without having to toil over servers, load balancing, prompting, model selection/fine-tuning, and of course getting the characters to work in Second Life within the parameters we all deal with each day.

For the creators watching this thread and especially to those who make AI characters for advanced, narrative-driven NPCs in roleplay — we are attempting to make a tool that would potentially have a deeper integration than LSL can provide, and are not in the market to directly compete. If you are interested in shaping this product, I highly encourage you to fill out the following form and we'll be in touch: https://forms.gle/6w1X9PuFsAfsjxJk9 (heads up, I will be reviewing these).

In terms of data collection, the term 'harvesting' data came up. We work very closely with Convai and have complete control over the pipeline. To reiterate, data is not being used to train any models, it's not being shared, sold, or used in any other way other than to return a response. If something like confidential computing (where only you hold the keys to the conversation) is important to you, let us know.. That goes for any additional feature that would give the grid peace of mind

The thread was left open, and people continuing to comment, some expressing a little sadness the experiment was over. As of the writing of this article, it was 25 pages long. 

So for now, Linden Lab's AI experiment is on hold. For how long is unknown. 

To check out the forum thread, Click Here. 

Bixyl Shuftan